We are now in the second year of real cord cutting. The statistics show the traditional cable industry losing about 1 million customers per quarter. The numbers for the recently ended 3Q of 2018 come from the Leichtman Research Group and I compare to year-end 2017.
| 3Q 2018 | 4Q 2017 | Change | ||
| Comcast | 22,015,000 | 22,357,000 | (342,000) | -1.5% |
| DirecTV | 19,625,000 | 20,458,000 | (883,000) | -4.1% |
| Charter | 16,628,000 | 16,997,000 | (369,000) | -2.2% |
| Dish | 10,286,000 | 11,030,000 | (744,000) | -6.7% |
| Verizon | 4,497,000 | 4,619,000 | (122,000) | -2.6% |
| Cox | 4,035,000 | 4,200,000 | (165,000) | -3.9% |
| AT&T | 3,693,000 | 3,657,000 | 36,000 | 1.0% |
| Altice | 3,322,800 | 3,405,500 | (82,700) | -2.4% |
| Frontier | 873,000 | 961,000 | (88,000) | -9.2% |
| Mediacom | 793,000 | 821,000 | (28,000) | -3.4% |
| Cable ONE | 328,921 | 283,001 | 45,920 | 16.2% |
| Total | 86,096,721 | 88,788,501 | (2,691,780) | -3.0% |
These companies represent roughly 95% of the entire cable market. Not included in these numbers is WOW with over 400,000 cable customers.
This group of large companies dropped almost 2.7 million customers so far this year, with losses in the third quarter over 1 million – making the third quarter the biggest losing quarter in history. Cord cutting is accelerating and 2018 is certainly going to exceed the 3.1 million cable customers that dropped in 2017.
The big losers are the satellite companies which lost 1,577,000 customers so far in 2018. These losses are offset by the fact that these two companies own the largest online video service, with Dish’s Sling TV now having 2,370,000 customers and DirecTV Now having 1,858,000 customers.
Not reflected in these numbers is the fact that 2018 so far has been a boom year for building new homes, with 1.6 million new housing units added nationally during the year so far. If you assume that new homes buy cable TV at the same rate as older homes, then the estimate of cord cutting would be 1.1 million higher for the first three quarters than is shown in these net numbers shown in the table.
In 2017 Comcast and Charter didn’t fare as poorly as the rest of the industry, but their rate of loss has roughly doubled over a year ago.
Cable ONE looks to a bit of an anomaly, but they had lost over 11% of customers in 2017 due to disputes with programmers, and they seem to have recaptured many of those customers.
The most obvious thing that jumps out from these numbers is that cord cutting is real and is here to stay. Within two short years after the start of the cord cutting phenomenon the big cable providers are on track to lose over 4% of total traditional cable subscribers in a year. That’s a lot of lost revenue for these companies and a lot of lost revenues for the programmers.